A tour of the Wine Group offices and plant at Concannon - 17 April

The Concannon winery in Livermore has, for decades, been a part of
the large Wine Group corporation, said to be the second or third
largest such company in the world and dating back to 1981. Their
corporate offices have been in San Francisco, but they now have a
fine new building within the Concannon vineyards on Tesla Road –
vineyards that were amongst the first acreage to become part of the
Trivalley Conservancy that holds the land for agricultural usage
(vineyards or olives).

The Concannon winery is one of two similarly sized wineries in
Livermore; equally old Wente is the other. The Concannon output is
some 400,00 cases per year, so it has long been a major wine
producer. Recently they have enlarged and modernized their
operations, ensconcecd now in a new building.

On a Thursday morning I was invited by Jim Concannon, grandson of the
founder of the winery, to join several other friends of his for a
tour of the new facilities: the corporate offices, the meeting rooms,
the “wine cellar” or barrel room, the analytical chemistry
laboratory, and the bottling room. Jim is proud of having attended
St. Mary’s College, and two representatives of that college were with
us (Anne Cooper and Lisa Moore), along with Bob and Gloria Taylor,
owners of neighboring Retzlaff Winery and Gary Brink, who runs the
tasting room at neighboring Page Mill Winery.

We walked past rows of large insulated stainless steel fermenting
tanks that stand outside, each doing its quiet work on several
thousand gallons of contained grapejuice, arriving at a side door of
the new facilities. From Tesla Road one sees this low
spanish-influence style building beyond vineyards — the vines that
produce the Concannon Cabernet Sauvignon and Petite Sirah available
mostly to visitors and members of their Gateway wine club.

The southern portion of the building, facing Tesla Road, holds the
various offices of the corporation management. Each of these has a
nice view through a window across vineyards and on to the hills that
border Livermore Valley to the south. I was struck by the presence in
most of the offices of numerous bottles of wine, with assorted labels
(some rather whimsical), standing on the dark mahogany furniture.

This is to be expected in a company whose product is wine, but it
contrasts starkly with the offices found at the major Livermore
employer, the former LLNL, where alcohol is strictly forbidden.
Amongst the offices are those of the two winemakers, one originally
from Australia, the other from Hungary. Jim Concannon was, until
selling the company in 1978, the winemaker for Concannon.

Sharing the front of the building is a spotless chemical analysis
laboratory, wherein a chemist can determine the properties of various
wine samples. From one of the countertops, next to a small glass
distillation apparatus familiar to any chemistry student, one has a
lovely view across the vineyards.

Next to this area is a small room in which there stands, centered, a
large table in which there are half a dozen sinks. This is where
professional wine tasters ply their trade: one takes a sip of wine,
swirls it in the mouth, and then expels the wine into the sink.

On the north side of the building, not readily visible from the
street, are several huge high-ceilinged rooms. The first of these,
referred to by Jim as the wine cellar, holds the barrels of French
oak in which some wines age. This is amongst the largest rooms in the
Livermore Valley. Gigantic oak tanks stand permanently on the East
side, while racks of barrels stand to the west. In early May those
will be moved to make room for the annual Wine Auction Gala, being
held for the first time at Concannon.

The next huge room holds the bottling plant. It holds an almost fully
automated assembly line, with equipment imported from Italy (perhaps
designed with the aid German engineers): it may well represent the
state of the art in bottling plants. The wine arrives in trucks and
is pumped into local tanks from which it will travel by a network of
overhead stainless steel pipes to the filling station. A truck
brings the cardboard cases of empty bottles to a loading dock;
workmen place the cases onto a starting conveyor. They go to a
station in which the empty bottles are automatically removed from the
cases, which then proceed via separate line to meet later. The
bottles are blown out with nitrogen, filled with wine, capped, and
labeled. They then return to their cardboard cases, are stacked and
shrink-wrapped with plastic, and are taken by fork lift to the
interior of a waiting truck. When the line is running it fills 125
bottles a minute.

Although almost all of the operation is automated, with events taking
place at specialized stations between which bottles or cases move by
conveyor, it is still necessary to have humans around. Jim says that
these fellows all have at least two years of college education.

The bottling plant is one of many in California operated by the Wine
Group. It bottles output from many wineries, carrying a variety of
labels, each of which transports the wine here in large truck-borne
stainless steel tanks. This operation runs 20 hours a day, with time
out for changeover. Jim says the Wine Group is particularly noted for
their efficiency of operation, but that they also are committed to
environmentally friendly (green) operations. Solar panels on the
roofs will provide some 40% of the electricity needs of the plant.
Jim stressed that environmental concern is not just a matter of good
citizenship, but it makes good business sense.

A separate room holds cases of their own reserve wines — the ones
from the local vines for members of their wine club. These grapes
will be undergoing crush in a small facility now being constructed,
to be ready for the fall crush. Jim told me the construction has
often had to halt when the construction equipment broke into a water
line — his grandfather, in laying out the pipes back in 1883, did
not keep records of their location.

On concluding my visit I could see why Jim Concannon takes such pride
in the continuation of the operation that bears his family name;
though the parent company is large, he is still very much a part of
the winemaking business that his grandfather started, and which he
ran for many years.